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The Lee brothers were right inside that garage when Maria got kidnapped! What the HELL guys, you didn’t hear her getting beaten up outside?

Maybe they were getting changed or something.

OK, so here’s my Double Dragon story. I loved the arcade game. So much so that I would just watch people playing it whenever I couldn’t afford to play it myself. I had never seen anything like it before and there was no comparable game on my humble C64. So as you could imagine I was thrilled when the C64 home conversion came about – by Aussie superstars Melbourne House no less.

It was terrible. Absolutely terrible. Not even a “well what do you expect for the C64” kind of terrible. The machine could do side-scrolling brawlers quite well thanks very much – Renegade….uh, Target Renegade…er…Renegade 3. Anyway. Having a couple of sprites on the screen moving around 2D scrolling backdrops wasn’t an impossible task.

In the C64 version of Double Dragon, the two sprites that made up each person weren’t even attached to each other. Nothing worked right. It looked ugly. The weapons were crap. The collision detection was woeful. It was a horrible excuse for a game and I was out $30 because of it.

Gutted.

Fast forward fifteen-odd years and I find myself working with a man who, among his many claims to fame, was the producer of the C64 version of Double Dragon. Small world. He said that the deadline was impossibly tight, and the coders had no real practical experience with the game or the C64 but they were cheap and available, and they had no choice but to put in the box whatever they were supplied with. They even had to issue an apology in the box to try and explain away the technical issues. It was a rush job and it showed.

You bet your ass I demanded my $30 back from him.

(There was also an Atari 2600 version, which was actually half decent for the machine! How the hell they did it I have no idea)

Here are some other comics you might like!

As a (former) game designer I look at Superman with immense dread. I hope I never have to make a Superman game. He is the complete opposite of how you make a video game character – he is invulnerable and has, like, every power ever. You’re basically reduced to covering every enemy with Kryptonite and introducing arbitrary time limits on everything since they’re the only two things he can’t handle, and even they’re not as formidable as they once were.

I love the character as a comic reader, though. I was obsessed with the John Byrne reboot at the time and they were a bunch of great simple Superman stories where Superman fought bad guys. Have you read a Superman comic lately? Sheeesh. What a mess. Time for another reboot…oh wait.